Powerful book that has shaped your thoughts and perspective as an individual! write 5 pages
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2019, I set a goal to read 100 books — but unfortunately, I fell short. Due to a combination of illness, personal challenges, and plain old lack of motivation, I only read around 77.
But 77 books is still enough to feel the books blur together. Rather, to feel most of them blur together. When you read so many books, there’s always a handful that stick out above the rest. Books that not only teach you what you need to know, but change you at a deeper level.
What makes a book change you is less about how good a book is, and more about how right a book is — whether the right person is reading the right book at the right time.
So, what follows is not a list of the world’s best books or the books with the best writing quality, but the 5 books that changed my life this year. They were, for me, the right books at the right time.
Note that these are the five best books I read in 2019, not the 5 best books that came out in 2019.
‘The World Beyond Your Head’ by Matthew B. Crawford
“The cherished “coherence” of the self is a myth we ought to grow out of anyway.” — Matthew B. Crawford
For a long time, the theology of eastern religions seemed like woo-woo nonsense to me. I heard them say “all things are one” and arrogantly thought “well, I’m not the same thing as my hairdryer, so clearly everything is not one. Duh.”
When I read The World Beyond Your Head, that stopped. Crawford explains, in a philosophical and nonreligious way, how we are all ultimately contingent with our environment. We like to imagine we have independent ‘selves’ that stand above the world and make judgments about it, but in reality, that which we call a ‘self’ is itself determined by our surroundings. We are no more independent of our environments than the plants and animals around us.
This stands in contrast to the typical western conception of the ‘self’ as a mystical other that stands above the world, looking down and making impartial decisions. This is reflected in western religious ideologies like the idea of the soul, or animating forces that exist independently of the body and go somewhere else when the body expires.
The significance of this is that if our ‘selves’ are contingent with our environment, then we have to include our environment in our definition of our ‘selves.’ When you consider this, the entire idea of separate souls or spirits begins to fall apart.
If this sounds like a hard sell, that’s because I’m trying to do so in two paragraphs. In The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford provides an amazing proof of this and more. Anyone looking to understand what it means to live should give this book a read.
‘Become What You Are’ by Alan Watts
“Apart from life, the self is as meaningless as a solitary note taken from a symphony, as dead as a finger cut from the hand, and as stagnant as air caught from the wind and shut tight in a room.” — Alan Watts
Of all the books on this list, Become What You Are is by far and away my favourite. Had I read Become What You Are before reading The World Beyond Your Head, it probably wouldn’t have captured my interest so vividly. But after Crawford taught me that the ‘self’ does not exist (aside from as a convenient construction we use to understand the world), what Alan Watts had to say made a lot more philosophical sense.
And what he has to say is this: Nothing exists except the present moment. The past doesn’t exist. The future doesn’t exist. Your thoughts and memories about these things don’t exist either. You don’t even exist, not really — what you call “yourself” is just an abstraction created to help the mind understand what’s going on, to help the mind understand the thoughts which pass through it.
The problem is, we’ve become overinvested in this abstraction. We’ve let the mind create so many thoughts it’s spun out of control. Together, our minds have created an entire imaginary reality, full of things like ‘ambition’ and ‘religion’ and ‘duties’ to keep its little top spinning.
Become What You Are is a book of essays loosely connected by these themes, and my favourite essay in the book is The Finger and The Moon. It’s a short but extraordinarily well-crafted essay that explains that while religion is important, many people miss its point. The point of religion is to be a finger, pointing at something; once you see what it’s pointing at, you no longer need the finger.
I will admit that sometimes, Watt’s style is a little flowery. People used to hard-nosed academic works will have a tough time taking Watts seriously. But if those tough academic-types can suspend disbelief for long enough to get through the book, I daresay they will find something useful within.
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